


In Dreams

by incoffeespoons



Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Angst, Introspection, M/M, Vaguely Inception-flavoured
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-14
Updated: 2012-07-14
Packaged: 2017-11-09 23:04:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,188
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/459472
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/incoffeespoons/pseuds/incoffeespoons
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Charles’ dreams have never been anything to ponder over. Many nights he did not dream at all. He liked this. The quiet echoed inside his skull, thick and dark and warm.</p><p>He did not dream of torpedoes and seas and screams. He did not dream of Erik. But now he closed his eyes and that was what he saw: pressed up against his lids, like poetry distilled into form.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In Dreams

The first time it happens, there is a face full of sand, and blurred screams – resonating, ricocheting, full – and the kids are clustered together like they’re a decade younger than their real ages, and it’s bright. Migraine-bright. Dazzling. Hits Charles in the head like a hammer.  


And Erik is there, stands tall, unreal. His hand extends out towards the ships that bob in the distance, and the sky is flecked with the fat dark shapes of the missiles. For a second they freeze, before curving in a graceful arc towards the boats, which look so small as to be children’s toys.  


Charles does not speak, because the screams are still so loud, a fog in his head, but he manages to stand. The sky is luminous and vivid, and the gentle waves splashing against the sand are shining. They look like he could dip a cup into the glassy surface and sip the contents. And the explosions on the horizon – they are fireworks.  


Erik turns to look at him, and smiles. The noise from the blasts thunders in Charles’ ears, pushes him out of this blurred mess, and he wakes up, hands furled in his bedcovers. It is very, very quiet.  


*  


Charles’ dreams have never been anything to ponder over. They were ordinary, saturated in the colours of his day, populated by old classmates and friends and corridors and rooms he knew every detail of. Many nights he did not dream at all. He liked this. The quiet echoed inside his skull, thick and dark and warm.  


He did not dream of torpedoes and seas and screams. He did not dream of Erik. But now he closed his eyes and that was what he saw: pressed up against his lids, like poetry distilled into form.  


*  


When Erik closed his eyes, people died.  


They were crushed beneath great fallen pillars; they were trapped on sinking boats; they were shot and strangled and stabbed. Sometimes they were people he loved. Sometimes, even when still trapped in the dream, regret bit at his stomach. Sometimes he killed so easily that it startled him, made him wonder if it should be as quick and simple as a brief flash of concentration, a tiny strain on his mind.  


People died in his dreams, and so even his subconscious had a body count. The dead begged for so much of his attention there was little room for anyone else. Until Charles started strolling in, as if just passing through on his way to somewhere else. And so, when he dreams of the beach, of the ships full of dead that never really were, Charles is next to him: the man that never really was, who looks at the sinking ships and does not say a word, and in that silence is everything good and everything that Erik wanted.  


*  


For several nights afterwards, Charles struggles to sleep, resting in short naps that leave his head aching and mind dreamless. It’s not that he worries in the gaps between his little gasps of sleep; whether it is shock or a heavy and vast acceptance, anxiety is not something that enters his brain.  


He ought, he thinks, to dream of Raven; she occasionally used to flit in and out of his dreams, and he misses her enough to will her into existence in his sleep now. When he tries to rest, he fills his mind with old memories of her, pictures her, hopes this image of Raven stays around as he falls asleep. But when he finally manages to rest properly for the first time since he was thrown back to the beach, she is not there.  


Instead there is a room Charles has never seen, a small space with patterned sofas and a hardwood floor and a window crusted with dust. The room is dull, something sad about the worn rug on the floor and the faded furniture. A child’s set of wooden blocks sits in one corner, half-assembled into a rudimentary tower.  
He is sure he did not see Erik walk in, but there he stands, next to the window. It is blank outside, the scenery undrawn. Charles is fairly sure there is nothing to look at. Still, though, Erik looks.  


*  


They are in Erik’s old house, the one that now exists only in terms of abstract memory and emotion. His family moved from this house when he was five, and he is unsure whether the awful, sagging sofas and the pale wallpaper are truly remnants of this house or just subtly superimposed by his memory later on. This was the front room, though, the sureness blooming rose-like inside him – this _is_. He remembers the wooden floor, remembers slipping on it in socked feet.  


There is a small and wavering ‘E’ in the bottom corner of the window, etched in childish handwriting into dust he is confident his mother never allowed to grow so thick. He reaches out to touch it, but when his fingers are a breath away from the window there is a high and overwhelming noise that spreads out, speckling the air, and the window shatters into infinitesimally tiny shards. They fall towards him like a waterfall and then hit the ground, a great heap of ever-rising crystals. A second later there is a hand on his shoulder and he is being pulled backwards. The pieces of glass are still falling. He wonders if they will ever stop.  


“You could have hurt yourself,” Charles says. He looks very clean in this room. Untainted, Erik thinks.  
Charles’ grip on his arm is painfully tight. And in increments Erik realises that this is not happening, that he is dreaming, and Charles won’t let go of his arm even though Erik shouts This is a dream, this is not real, as if his life depended on making the distinction.  


He looks up at the window again. It is whole and shining, the dust gone, the ‘E’ vanished. He is pulling Charles over to look at it when he wakes up, like a diver pulled to the surface, a shout cloying in his throat: _This is a dream. Broken things have been made whole._  


*  


By the second dream, Charles knows this is not his subconscious’ work. He does not tell anyone, and he hopes beyond anything that the not-quite-him who ducks inside Erik’s dreams as if he has a right to be there does not breathe a word out of the ordinary. He persuades himself that this is the best course of action, colours it with logic and reason until closing his eyes and seeing his friend there in the darkness feels like the act of a martyr.  


 _I will keep an eye on him,_ he thinks, imagining battle plans instead of beaches and childhood homes.  


It isn’t the first time he has mistakenly ended up inside another person’s head while sleeping, but before there were just glimpses – a cluster of noises, a particular strange feeling. This accidental trespassing is just a side-effect of powers that grow stronger every day. Like all side-effects, it simply has to be managed.  


*  


It is hot. The sunlight is everywhere, smudged over everything Erik can see, a thin orange-gold cast. Tangling up to his shoulders are crops of ambiguous identity, and although he spent all of his time in Argentina on the road he knows that is where he is – Argentina – with conviction. The crops dig into him, and claustrophobia makes his throat tighten, and he starts to run. The ground is soft beneath his feet, pulls at the bottoms of his shoes.  


He hears rustling ahead of him, movement in the crops, and spins around, intending to run back where he came. Penning three sides of the field are skyscrapers made of concrete, high enough to touch the buttery-looking clouds. They cast no shadow, and Erik is still looking at these buildings when Charles appears, the creator of all of the rustling and noise. His jaw is clenched, eyes wide.  


“You can’t go that way,” he says, gesturing at where he has just run from. No tall structures block that edge of the field – there is only sky. “Don’t.”  


“Why?”  


“In the…soil, in the ground, there are bodies. Awful. You can’t.”  


Erik looks at the path trampled by Charles, sees only crops. “There’s nothing there.” Panic is spreading through him, and so he starts to walk just for something to do. When Charles doesn’t follow him, he glares, says “Hurry”, pretends he can’t hear Charles’ refusals that blur into one clot of negativity.  


“We’re going,” Erik insists.  


“Don’t.”  


And then he can’t move. Physically can’t: arms and legs as still as if ice was in his veins. Charles frowns and digs one foot into the ground a little, and then everything is gone, faded, and he thinks he liked it better when Charles was quiet.  


*  


The last time it happens, there is little fanfare. Charles finds himself walking on a stretch of grass, and it is cool and calm and none of the colours shout in his face the way they usually do. It almost does not feel like one of Erik’s dreams at all. It’s too soft-edged. When Charles wakes up, he will think about the ethics of being able to fit another person’s dreams into a distinctive category, of viewing them like a work of art that can be walked away from, but for now there is just the grass and the sky.  


In the distance he can see the great white shape of the satellite dish, the one that stands near his house. It is only a little nearer than the horizon, but after a few steps Charles is at its foot, as if the Earth had contracted in folds beneath him.  


Erik is around the other side of the satellite dish. He walks around the base, hands tucked behind his back formally. A small flock of blackbirds coast overhead. The noise of their wings flapping is grotesque, too flesh-like. When Erik looks at them, his face is impassive, but he quickens his pace.  


“I know what you’re doing,” he says. He is still several feet away, has to speak in a raised voice. “You never ask.” His tone is steely but dipped in amusement, the sort that is packaged up with superiority. “You’re nothing but a thief.”  


“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”  


The satellite dish groans, an awful metallic noise that makes Charles shiver, and begins to turn. Only a little, before the noise stops, before Erik looks at the new position of the satellite and smiles. The concave bowl faces them now, and the soft sunlight is amplified by all of the white. Charles squints a little. This loudness, this overstimulation – this is the inside of Erik’s mind, a place where explosions are merely background noises.  


“Are you filing reports on me?” says Erik. “Have you figured out where I am? I wonder if your little friends have figured out yet how unsafe it is even to think around you.”  


“Erik,” Charles says, a warning, because any mention of the children sets panic threading through him. He just wants to get out of this place now, wants to leave. He glances behind him, at his house tucked away behind its back lawn and landscaping and ornate carved wall. He just wants to leave. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”  


Erik walks forward. Puts his hands on Charles’ shoulders, fixing him in place. “You’re in my head,” he says. “I can tell. I’m not stupid. You have to go.” His voice is not accusatory; he is listing facts, reasonable, painfully reasonable.  


The thing with dreams, Charles knows, is that they do not consist of the present solely: they are everything at once, every small cast-out memory, every forgotten place. In dreams, he walks, and in dreams Erik is afraid. They may not be exterior reality, but they piece together inward things that shock and surprise more than the world outside.  


This is Erik’s dream, mapped out in his mind, but Charles is there, having been pulled in, reeled in, somewhat helpless, somewhat not. He purses his lips and reaches up his right hand, resting it on Erik’s, and then looks at the satellite.  


When it begins to fall, it is very, very slow, but after a second the speed it gathers is impressive if only in its deliberateness: there is an inevitability in the way it is tilting towards the ground, and the sound is deafening.  


“This is a dream,” shouts Charles, “it’s okay,” and then, when the shadow has entirely blocked out the pale grey light, and the dome of the satellite is close, it is all he can do to repeat those words. That because something is not real, it will not matter and it will not hurt. _This is a dream,_ he says, _I am a dream._ It is a removal of responsibility. If his crimes are unreal, the blame rests nowhere. This is a desperate act, but it is his last.  


“I know,” Erik says, and then they are falling through the ground and out of unconsciousness.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to acrosshallowedgrounds and smiling-damned-villain on Tumblr for reading this through and helping out.


End file.
